The Conversation In late June, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a group of independent experts convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), published an assessment of the origins of COVID.
The report concluded that although we don’t know conclusively where the virus that caused the pandemic came from:
a zoonotic origin with spillover from animals to humans is currently considered the best supported hypothesis.
SAGO did not find scientific evidence to support “a deliberate manipulation of the virus in a laboratory and subsequent biosafety breach”.
This follows a series of reports and research papers since the early days of the pandemic that have reached similar conclusions: COVID most likely emerged from an infected animal at the Huanan market in Wuhan, and was not the result of a lab leak.
But conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins persist. And this is hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic.
Attacks on our research
As experts in the emergence of viruses, we published a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Medicine in 2020 on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.